There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard sets and best sellers — unread, untouched. (This deluded individual owns woodpulp and ink, not books.) The second has a great many books — a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought. (This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect for their physical appearance.) The third has a few books or many — every one of them dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.)

We want our students to be the third kind of book owners. Engaging with a text physically by annotating is a sign of engaging with a text intellectually.

We ask families of seventh and eighth graders at our school to purchase the novels their teens read in class, rather than using school copies. This is solely because we want students to be writing in their books. But this is hard for some people to understand. Each year we get phone calls from parents who want to know if their teen can use an older brother or sister’s novel, so they don’t have to shell out more money than they have to. And I understand that. It seems excessive to have three copies of Les Miserables, To Kill a Mockingbird, and War of the Worlds in the house. But what that tells me as an educator is that we have to do a better of job of explaining the importance of annotating–that using another student’s annotated book in class is like using someone else’s essay to write their own.

To that end, today’s roundup pulls together a few resources from around the web to highlight the importance of annotating:

Practicing Useful Annotation Strategies – Dinah Mack and Holly Epstein Ojalvo, New York Times: “In this lesson, students review strategies of annotation and consider the benefits. They brainstorm ways to annotate, explore various methods in depth and test the value of annotating while reading.”

Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margin – Dirk Johnson, New York Times: “examining marginalia reveals a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.”

On Annotating Books – from Emma Nichols, Book Riot – “I love paging through old books and reading the bits Iâ€ve annotated. Occasionally theyâ€ll bring me back to that first read—the surprise and delight of a sentence/phrase/whole paragraph—but mostly the sentences feel fresh and new. Looking at old annotations is like seeing a version of myself from two or three or five years ago.”

How to Mark a Book – Peter Stephens, Slow Reads: “First, I annotate a book to create trails as if I were the first person to hike through a particular forest.”

“Marginalia” – a poem by Billy Collins: “Sometimes the notes are ferocious,/skirmishes against the author/raging along the borders of every page/in tiny black script.”

For a thorough exploration of the history and use of book annotations, you can do no better than Marginalia by H.J. Jackson, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

And finally, your students may appreciate Ariel Bassett’s enthusiastic endorsement of annotating books:

I swear that the story I’m about to tell you is true. It’s odd and a little eerie, but it really happened. First, though, a little background.

A Book Bargain for Bibliophiles

A few years ago as I was sifting through the discount bin of a local bookstore, I stumbled across a gem of a book titled The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them. I paid $1.99 for this priceless treasure-trove of personal testimonies to the transformative power of reading. I highly recommend this collection of essays as a great read-aloud for your language arts class. Each essay is short enough to read in a few minutes and would be a great way to begin a lesson. The book has essays by Dorothy Allison, Harold Bloom, Billy Collins, Patricia Cornwell, and David Halberstam, just to name a few; and the authors pay tribute to works including The Lord of the Rings, The Yearling, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, Charlotte’s Web, and many, many more.

As I was thinking about how the book could be used to launch a writing assignment (students could write about a book that has had a profound influence on them, or maybe they could interview a relative, asking them which book has changed their lives), I began thinking about the book that has had the most profound effect on me. The first book that came to mind–no surprise for those who know me–is The Lord of the Rings. And it’s true, that book more than any other has changed my life. But before I met Frodo, Samwise, and the rest of the Fellowship, I was a ten-year old kid living in Kennewick, Washington, who had never read a real book. And then one day…

My Story

In the summer of 1976, we lived on a quiet little lane on the top of Garfield Hill in Kennewick, Washington, where one magical summer day I was playing outside alone. I don’t remember what I was playing, or why my brothers and sister weren’t outside with me, but I do remember standing on our front porch watching a strange boy approach towing a little red wagon. I say strange not only because I had never seen him before, but also because of his odd behavior. He was three or four houses away, and he walked slowly down the street tugging his Red Flyer behind him, stopping in front of each and every driveway in the cul-de-sac. He had sandy-blonde hair and wore jeans and a striped t-shirt, and he looked as if he were my age, or maybe a year or two older. It’s peculiar how his image is burned into my memory.

As he approached each house he would pause at the driveway, look at the front door for a few moments, then he would reach into his red wagon and pull something out of it which he tossed into the driveway. Then he would nod his head in satisfaction and move on to the next house. As he got closer and closer, I could see what he was throwing into the driveways.

Books.

His Red Flyer was filled with books.

Finally he got to our house. But instead of looking at our door he looked directly at me. He looked me up and down, and then he nodded to himself. He turned around, reached into his wagon, and pulled out a book. He smiled and said, “You’ll like this.” And then he tossed it into the driveway and walked on, pulling his Red Flyer behind him.

I waited for him to get a house or two away then came down to the driveway and gingerly picked up the book he had left behind for me. For me. “You’ll like this,” he had said. It was a hardcover book with a blue spine. The front cover read, The Hardy Boys: The Mystery of the Chinese Junk. It had a picture of two boys in a motorboat on the water staring at a foreign-looking sailing ship. I ran inside and showed it to my mom, who was in the kitchen, baking.

“Mom! Look what someone just threw into our driveway.”

She wiped her hands on a dishrag and took the book.

“Oh, the Hardy Boys. You’ll like it. You should read it.”

That’s all she said. No questions about who threw it or why. Just, “You’ll like it.”

So I took it and read it. The first real book I ever read. And they were both right, the strange boy and my mother. I did like it. In fact, I loved it. There was a big list of other Hardy Boy books on the back cover, and I asked my mom if she would buy them for me, and she did, as quickly as I could read them: The Tower Treasure, While the Clock Ticked, The Disappearing Floor, The Secret of the Caves, and many more. A lifelong love of reading had been born.

I never saw the boy again. I don’t know who he was or why he went through our neighborhood tossing books into driveways that day. But I still have the book. That Hardy Boys book changed my life. From that moment on I was a reader, and my life has never been the same.

Your Story

How about you? Your turn, now, to think about the book that changed your life. Leave a comment, even if it’s only the title and author. Or tell us the whole story.

Short and to the point, ROMAN Reading gives readers the five tools they need to understand sophisticated books, and presents them in a way that is easy to remember:

R: Read the book/story all the way through once.

O: Outline the major events or elements of the book.

M: Mark the book.

A: Ask the right questions.

N: Name your experience.

In this expanded practice edition of ROMAN Reading, students get the chance to apply their new skills immediately with stories by some of the world’s greatest writers:

• “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov
• “God Sees the Truth But Waits” by Leo Tolstoy
• “The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde
• “How Much Land Does a Man Need” by Leo Tolstoy
• A Christmas Carol (unabridged) by Charles Dickens

Each story includes a checklist so readers can work their way through the five different skills and keep track of their progress.

ROMAN Reading is ideal for classrooms or home schools, as each section could be taught as a single lesson, and the entire book could be used for a multi-week introduction to how to read literature. The included stories offer thought-provoking issues and themes that make for lively discussions.

I’ve used the information in this book for many years, and I’ve seen the difference it can make in teen readers. ROMAN Reading also includes my own reading list of great books, collated from thirteen other “great books” lists.

Try ROMAN Reading today, and help the young men and women in your life begin their journey to becoming literate, skilled readers.

If you’re interested in reviewing ROMAN Reading, let me know and I’d be happy to provide you with an electronic copy.

“A wonderful story of triumph over imperfection, shame, and loss. Large, awkward, learning-disabled Maxwell Kane, whose father is in prison for murdering his mother, and crippled, undersized Kevin are both mocked by their peers; the cruel taunting they endure is all too realistic and believable. The boys establish a friendship-and a partnership. Kevin defends them with his intelligence, while Max is his friend’s “legs,” affording him a chance to participate in the larger world. Inspired by tales of King Arthur, they become knights fighting for good and true causes….The author writes with empathy, honoring the possibilities of even peripheral characters; Kevin and Max are memorable and luminous.”

For the past three years, my eighth graders have found it engaging, entertaining and moving. Here are ten reasons why you should consider reading it to your seventh or eighth grade class:

1. The main characters are seventh graders going into eighth grade, and they’re portrayed like realistic junior high kids.
2. Both characters are social outsiders, which does two important things: a) it gives the social outsiders in your own class someone to identify with; b) more importantly, it helps the rest of the kids in the class be more accepting of the differences of others.
3. There is a strong pro-reading anti-TV message to the story that doesn’t come off preachy, corny or phony.
4. The novel shows that a person’s value does not come from what they can do or not do, but from their very being.
5. The book constantly makes reference to Arthurian legends, always a popular subject with 8th graders.
6. Both boys and girls find the story compelling, from the adventurous antics and kidnapping subplot to concern over the treatment of those with disabilities.
7. The chapters are short enough to read at the beginning of class without cutting into the period too much.
8. With only 23 chapters, the book can be read in about a month.
9. Kevin is a loveable geek, and there aren’t enough loveable geeks in fiction
10. Finally, there are at least a half a dozen ways the book can be incorporated into literature, reading or religion class; a few examples:
    • As an exploration of what writing fiction is – Kevin often talks about the power of remembering, and the control a person has over what he or she remembers
    • As an example of how writing can be therapeutic – Max writes the story to get over the traumatic events of that year
    • As a discussion-starter for how to treat people with differences – Both Max and Kevin struggle with being different, and the book offers hope to those who feel left out

In a gesture of great generosity, Rodman Philbrick has made available at no charge a version of Freak the Mighty as a one- or two-act play. To get a copy of the play as a pdf, visit Mr. Philbrick’s website and follow the directions you find there. While you’re at the site, be sure to look at the teacher’s guide.

I also highly recommend the movie adaption, The Mighty, starring Sharon Stone, Kieran Culkin, Gillian Anderson, and James Gandolfini. Even the soundtrack is incredible, with the title song performed by Sting. Be sure to preview the movie before showing it due to some swear words and few “birdies” flying, if you know what I mean.

[Cross posted at Catholic School Chronicle]

If you’re considering purchasing an e-reader, be sure to take a look at Len Edgerly’s thorough video comparing the Sony, Kobo, Nook and Kindle products:

Mortimer Adler on the Cover of Time Magazine, March 17, 1952

I firmly believe that Mortimer Adler is one of the most misunderstood and neglected thinkers of the last one hundred years. Often labeled elitist and Eurocentric, people often confuse his views on education with people like Allen Bloom and Ed Hirsch, who advocate a kind of cultural literacy as a key component of education. On the contrary, I believe Adler’s views on educational reform are deeply democratic and innovative. He was recommending changes to the educational system decades before other more trendy names were found for them. The concepts behind educational buzz words like “critical thinking,” “literature circles,” “project-based learning,” and “inquiry learning” are found throughout Adler’s writings.

Unfortunately for today’s schools, Adler’s work is often buried behind a prejudicial wall of misunderstanding, based on an incomplete and inaccurate picture of what Adler stood for. Adler is often invoked by homeschoolers (another misunderstood group), great books programs and private academies, leading to the false impression that his work is somehow arch-conservative, perennialist or exclusive. To be clear, while I consider Adler one of my intellectual heroes, I don’t agree with everything he proposed, and he sometimes comes across as arrogant. But I think many of his ideas are so important they deserve to be considered by everyone interested in educational reform.

To that end, I’d like to periodically share some of his ideas in his own words, with my occasional comments. Ideally, I’d love to get a conversation going about the reforms he suggests. So please feel free to drop in and leave comments whenever he or I touch a nerve.

To begin with, people often think that because Adler advocated great books programs that he is just another advocate of the “dead white male” approach to literature, whereby reading a limited set of writings gives us the truths of the universe. But as he explains below in his introduction to Reforming Education, this is not his idea of reading great books at all:

Some basic truths are to be found in the great books, but many more errors will also be found there, because a plurality of errors is always to be found for every single truth. One way of discovering this is to detect the contradictions that can be found in the books of every great author. Being human works, they are seldom free from contradictions. Skill in reading and thinking is required to find them. But, given that skill, finding contradictions in a book puts one on the highroad in the pursuit of truth. The truth must lie on one or the other side of every contradiction. It is there for us to detect when we are able to resolve the contradiction in favor of one side or the other….

The difference between [Leo] Strauss’ method of reading and and teaching the great books and the method that [Robert] Hutchins and I had adopted…lies in the distinction between a doctrinal and a dialectical approach. The doctrinal method is an attempt to read as much truth as possible (and no errors) into the work of a particular author, usually devising a special interpretation, or by discovering the special secret of an author’s intentions. This method may have some merit in the graduate school where students aim to acquire narrowly specialized scholarship about a particular author. But it is the opposite of the right method to be used in conducting great books seminars in schools and colleges where the aim is learning to think and the pursuit of truth.

A “dialectical approach” where the aim is “learning to think and the pursuit of truth.” In reading classrooms across America something very similar to this is done under the title “Literature Circles.” If more teachers read Adler’s ideas of how to conduct a seminar with students, the level of thinking in literature circles would skyrocket. In any case, I think it’s clear that Adler is less interested in a cultural language that everyone speaks than he is interested in true dialogue about important ideas. Of course, some people will deny his assumption that objective truth exists at all, but perhaps that’s something we can take up at a later date. At this point, I’m simply interested in clarifying what Adler’s intentions were in promoting the use of great books in education.

Some might wonder what Adler means by “great books.” In an entertaining essay called “The Great Books of 2066” Adler lists seven characteristics:

1. Great books are original communications. Their authors are communicating what they themselves have discovered, not repeating what they have learned by reading the books of other men.
2. Great books have intellectual amplitude; each draws light from and throws light on a large number and variety of ideas, all of them basic.
3. Great books are universally relevant and always contemporary; that is, they deal with the common problems of thought and action that confront men in every age and every clime.
4. Great books are the only books that may be deemed indispensable, every one of them, to a genuine, sound liberal education.
5. Great books are the only books that never have to be written again — that do so well what they set out to do that they cannot be improved upon. (For this simple but penetrating statement about the nature of a great book, I am grateful to my friend Carl Van Doren.)
6. Great books are inexhaustible; they are indefinitely reread-able, each time with additional profit; understandable to some degree on the first reading, they continue to deepen our understanding every time we reread them, and we can never exhaust their power to enlighten us; no matter how many times we read them, there is always more for us to understand.
7. Great books are addressed to human beings, not to some special group of students, scholars or experts; they are seldom written by professors and, if they are, they are never written exclusively for professors.

I look forward to hearing any thoughts you might have on Mortimer Adler and/or his ideas, especially as they relate to teaching.

Cross-posted at One Catholic Life.

Eyercize is a free online tool that may be able to help struggling readers increase their reading rate. The following screencast demonstrates some of Eyercize’s basic functions:

As the Save the Words website expresses it:

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved and unwanted.

Today 90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words.

You can change all that. Help save the words!

When you adopt a word, you make a solemn vow: “I hereby promise to use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to very best of my ability.”

This would be a clever and fun way to get students playing with words. After they adopt a word students could use it in a poem, in their daily work, or in class discussions.

How would you use this site in your classroom?

Courage?

Yes, courage.  I am a control freak and an introvert, two qualities which seem diametrically opposed to running a writing workshop.  Managing twenty-one students as they work independently on various digital creations gives me a lot of anxiety.  However, I am determined to give students the same chance to develop as writers as I give them as readers.  Just as I allow students the freedom to choose their own books to read, I will allow students to find their own topics, genres and  voices in which to write. Incorporating technology on a daily basis will enhance students’ abilities to become content creators for the 21st century.

These are the professional resources I have at my disposal for planning and implementing the digital writing workshop:

• Troy Hicks’ book The Digital Writing Workshop – I was in the middle of planning the workshop when I heard about this book, so I ordered it immediately; it should be here in a few days.
• The Digital Writing Workshop Ning Group
• My Twitter personal learning network – please feel free to join and share your experiences with me
• The educational blogs I follow via Google Reader (see the list in the right sidebar)
• And my favorite books on writing workshops in general:
  • In the Middle by Nancie Atwell
  • Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide by Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi
  • How’s It Going by Carl Anderson
  • Assessing Writers by Carl Anderson

The students will have access to the following technology:

• Each student will be working on a 13″ Macbook with iWork and iLife.
• The class has one digital camera and one digital video camera.
• I have a Zoom H2 portable digital recorder that students can use if they need it.
• Students also have access to blogs, wikis and the school YouTube account.

Wish me luck, and please share your thoughts, advice and resources with me.

Both experiences revolved around the word passion (a rather appropriate concept in the days leading up to Easter), and in the wake of the visionary ideas that were sparking across the electrons of the web yesterday, several thoughts came to me that I wanted to put into written words for better self-clarification. Maybe theyâ€ll resonate with you, too.

Passion Involves Suffering

As Sam Schechner explains, the word passion comes from the Latin passio which means suffering. Several teachers in yesterdayâ€s discussions lamented the way they get treated when they exhibit passion. This suffering is fairly common in people who express their strong feelings for a particular cause or ideal.  There is an energy and force to passion that can intimidate and/or startle people.

But there is more to the suffering of passion than just the reaction of intimidated acquaintances. Our passions arise from deep within us, from longings deep within our hearts. As a religious man, I understand this longing as ultimately a longing for God, and my passion as simply the way I attempt to find unity with the Person that is ultimate truth, goodness and beauty. This longing drives me and haunts me, and when I try to bury it or ignore it, I experience pain.

This is why we teachers must help students get in touch with the deepest longings of their hearts–to encounter the infinite desires within themselves and attempt to quench them. Anything short of this endeavor is a tragic disservice to students.

Passion Is Inherently Unquenchable

Ironically, we also experience pain when we try to satisfy our longings. No matter how successful we are in following our passions, we are never fully satisfied. Ask anyone who has completed a bachelorâ€s degree, or been recognized with a teaching award, for instance. The passion remains, and in some cases grows more intense with the realization that progress is beginning to be made.

Our students need to know that the skills, knowledge and connections they learn in school are merely the building blocks of living a passionate life. Each student must be encouraged to have the heart of a learner. No–thatâ€s not quite accurate. Rather, each student must recognize that he or she is already hard-wired with the heart of a learner, and that school is the place to develop and nurture that heart.

We teachers must embrace this reality with our entire being, Maybe that means doing away with grades and trusting to a student’s innate desire to learn, as Joe Bower suggests. Maybe it means offering students more autonomy in activities like writing workshop or independent reading. In any case, students will begin to quench their unquenchable desires with or without our help. We can work with them or against them.

Passion Is the Key

We have a tendency to call things passions that really are not. We say things like, “Education is my passion,” or “I have a passion for books.” At best, those expressions are shorthand for, “Education is what gives my life meaning,” and “Books are a significant way I make sense of the world.”

Our objects of passion are not the same thing as our passion. Passion is oneâ€s inner fire for truth, goodness and beauty, seeking to be shared with others. It is a burning within us, a fire in our hearts that we want to share with the world.

And therein lies the secret of teaching.

If we share our passion with students, then their fires will begin to burn all the more fiercely. Bitter, fatigued teachers cannot be effective fans for the flames of passion in students. Teachers who have lost the meaning of their lives are hard pressed to help students find meaning in their lives. We, too, must continue the lifelong joy of trying to quench the unquenchable fire, of nurturing the heart of a learner within ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.”

Are we awakening our students or putting them to sleep?

Follow Up with These Books:

• The Rhythm of Life by Matthew Kelly
• The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer
• The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser